[quote name='phantom' timestamp='1326904626' post='4904002']
It would be like the train system in the UK going on strike and thus trains in the US also stopping.

US is in control of ICANN and also host country of just about every major online service in the world, including banks and credit processors.

How would you feel if ICANN, Mastercard, Visa, Facebook, Google, Amazon, RIPE and others were hosted in China instead of US?

After all, policies wouldn't affect anyone outside of China, so why should 90% of users complain?

Let's start a petition. US isn't all that trustworthy anymore, let's move all these services to China. Or Iran. Because they won't affect anyone outside of those countries.
[/quote]

Yes, because clearly the only choices in the whole world are the US or China; but no, by all means carry on with your reductio ad absurdum but do wake me up when you've got a point to make....

And given the direction the US is heading I would agree it CAN'T be trusted with any major organisation which has any sort of impact on the rest of the world however, and this has been my key point all along there is nothing 90% of the web using world can do about it other than be inconvinenced for a day.

This is not a matter of 'trust' nor a matter of if 'SOPA is good or not' (it clearly isn't) it is a matter of a bunch of websites took themselves down and for the majority of people this is nothing more than an inconvenience and will have no impact on the policy makers at all (in fact probably gives a boost to the economy as a whole as less people will be wasting time on site such as wikipedia today) which is why the post I originally replied to comparing it to a strike is a bad example.

If this affects the rest of us or not in the long term is a side issue because right now there is nothing we can do about it.

And given the direction the US is heading I would agree it CAN'T be trusted with any major organisation which has any sort of impact on the rest of the world however, and this has been my key point all along there is nothing 90% of the web using world can do about it other than be inconvinenced for a day.

It raises awareness. That is not something that results in action today.

Very few internet users or population in general are even aware of concept of intellectual property, let alone the subtleties these laws are about.

If this affects the rest of us or not in the long term is a side issue because right now there is nothing we can do about it.[/quote]

We are sick of hearing about it since everything we read has been SOPA for past 2 months. We are the 1% in this case, if you will.

Protests are good, since they will reach mainstream media and general population that will learn new words and pay attention to them in future. Kinda like "weapons of mass destruction" or whatever is suitable for large scale action.

But all such actions are slow, they will take a generation. It's a start. One of million steps.


When it comes to inconvenience:
a) internet is irrelevant and nobody is inconvenienced, might as well be locked down
b) internet matters and enough people will not put up with it, so future attempts like this will be fought

Win-win.

Just because the protests are directed mostly at a particular bill as written, doesn't mean that they're not also directed at the general Ideas behind the bill in question. Ideas that are being considered in other nations as we speak.

It does when it doesn't mention them, or the plans about them.
Everything I've seen is so US-centric as to have no mention of these 'other plans' which is going to do 'the cause' no good at all.

http://www.google.co...date=ytd&sort=0

Based on the search locations on the bottom half of this it does somewhat prove my point too; if you were trying to have an impact on the US side you'd hope to see a large proportion of US based searches.

Instead a few other countries are trying to understand wtf is going on and that appears to be about it... granted it is one data point but it's certainly not showing a drive for people to find out what sopa is or all about...

We are sick of hearing about it since everything we read has been SOPA for past 2 months. We are the 1% in this case, if you will.

And just how are the other '1% protests' going?

Because it you take something like the Ocupy Wallstreet protest... well, this'll probably have about the same effect... those in the know will bang on about it while the general population, once they are no longer inconvininced, will in a few short days get on with their lifes as if nothing happened.

Maybe you can enlighten me as to when the last protest had a significant effect on something when it wasn't impacting the people causing the problem...

So..

Wikipedia is blacked out for now.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

some kind of protest. This sucks.. sicne this is the best website in the world and you didn't realize it until they take it offline for the blackout period!

Google Cache or click the escape key after the wiki page loads but before the SOPA page comes up. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And afaik only english wikipedia is blacked out so.